We interrupt your daily routine today to bring you a message from the Emperor, transcribed earlier today at the official ceremony celebrating the newest hero of the Empire. These honors are not given lightly, having been earned by years of dedication to the Emperor’s service. However, in light of the recent kidnapping attempt on his majesty, this hero’s efforts must be rewarded. So take a moment and attend to the Emperor’s message honoring the newest Imperial Ace pilot, Maarek Stele.

It’s that time again, so I won’t waste space with a preamble. You came here for cards!

Rogue Squadron Assault (Pod 141)

This objective set is going to do a lot for Rebel vehicles. It gives you some pretty reliable card draw on the objective, it gives you shockingly good units, a cute combo to try to pull off with “Hobbie,” and a non-limited resource. Everything about this set is desirable to me (being a Rebel player), and it even comes with two fantastic vehicles for Attack Pattern Delta

For the forseeable future during Pokemon TCG State Championships, I’m going to be sampling lists and breaking down the top decks as well as surprising meta variants. All too often in the Pokemon community pages I see talk but no demonstration (it’s a very backwards-secretive fanbase, despite the fact that you can’t really keep things secret no matter how hard you try on today’s Interwebs) and a lot of misdirection. Or, information is gated, wanting you to “pay for admission” to it. Hopefully you’ll have a decent frame of reference when looking over the lists here at TSC.

This tournament was going to be the first of our Spring League tournaments. Players will score points based on where they finish in each individual tournament, then an overall winner will be established at the end of the last week. To add a further change, players are only allowed to enter a tournament with a particular faction once during the league. This change was aimed at encouraging players to make the most out of their collections and try out the majority of the factions.

With the recent release of Zogwort’s Curse there were a few cards that I wanted to try out in a tournament environment. The card at the front of the line was Gleeful Plague Beast (see hoopjones’ article about it for more details). With that in mind, I constructed a Zarathur, High Sorcerer

I’ve been thinking that Chaos is borderline tier 1 for a bit now, and I feel that Gleeful Plague Beast

finally puts them up to snuff against the current heavy hitters. While I’ve been a fan of the Vicious Bloodletter

since the core came out, they always had big issues: there are many ways to stop them before they are able to strike. The newly released plague beast has many clear and distinct advantages compared to the ol’ Bloodletters that I may end up dropping the Khorne Daemons altogether.

Let’s look at the situations that favor each. Keep in mind, I do realize dealing 1 damage to your own units *can* be bad, but I generally think dealing 2 to your opponent and one to yourself is a great trade off (ala Ork Kannon

)

A last note I will make is that I am basing this decision while using Zarathur, High Sorcerer

This week I’m posting something different. Instead of an article, I made a gameplay video over the weekend! I’m still experimenting with audio setups so I apologize for the poor volume quality and background noise on this one. The next one will be better!

This is a video featuring me vs one of my teammates from my local meta. I’m running the Talon Karrde deck I’m so fond of (2x Karrde, 2x Home One, 2x Rebel Leia, 2x Han, 2x Chewie) and he’s running his Trooper build (2x Family Connections, 2x Dark Troopers, 2x Motti, 2x Take Them Prisoner, 2x Brawl). It’s a grindy matchup to be sure. I hope the commentary is interesting, and while next week will be another article, you can look forward to more videos coming in the future!

Every game has a spectrum of play. When a game against a single opponent requires both that you reach your victory condition and that you prevent your opponent from reaching theirs, some people will gravitate towards being assertive and some towards being reactive. This concept is well known thanks to tons of scholarship headed by Magic: the Gathering describing the spectrum of aggro (seeking to win as fast as possible) and control (preventing your opponent from winning until they run out of options).

Because it has become clearly defined in Magic, and different points on the “aggro-control” spectrum even associated to specific colors, it’s common practice for card games to assign similar points to different factions during initial design. Thus you end up with the “control faction,” the “aggro faction,” and the “midrange faction.” In Star Wars, this means Jedi and Sith are control, Rebels and Navy are aggro, and Smugglers and Scum are midrange (all Freeloader instant-win tricks aside). But for a game in which the light side is encouraged to attack, what the heck would a reactive control deck look like?

was that although I enjoyed having a mobile warlord, the rest of the build seemed like it required cookie cutter Eldar choices to ensure a strong combat presence…at least until we receive some better targets for . One of the trickiest elements of future playtesting is you are only given a small glance at the whole card pool before that Warlord is available.

When he was first spoiled, I was completely disinterested with Urien…especially compared to Packmaster Kith. Rakarth’s Experimentations

did not look very scary, and the signature squad didn’t have a command icon. However, multiple new cards have been spoiled since that time. Inspired by last week’s Baharroth testing, I thought about how I could build a deck with the next Dark Eldar warlord. The options were inspiring and surprisingly vast; there are so many solid card choices one can choose from, and multiple core set cards which were previously mediocre became amazing. Hypex Injector

anyone?

Well, after multiple games with the big bad torturer, I can safely say that he brings a whole new meaning to “choke” and some crazy powerful combat options that Kith does not have. Get ready for a new type of conquest deck: Event Control. Another shoutout to Sean for playtesting with me this week.Read full post →